White Shadows in the South Seas eBook

CHAPTER II

The trade-room of the Morning Star; Lying Bill Pincher;
M. L’Hermier des Plantes, future governor of the Marquesas;
story of McHenry and the little native boy, His Dog.

“Come ’ave a drink!” Captain Pincher
called from the cabin, and leaving the spray-swept
deck where the rain drummed on the canvas awning I
went down the four steps into the narrow cabin-house.

The cabin, about twenty feet long, had a tiny semi-private
room for Captain Pincher, and four berths ranged about
a table. Here, grouped around a demijohn of rum,
I found Captain Pincher with my three fellow-passengers;
McHenry and Gedge, the traders, and M. L’Hermier
des Plantes, a young officer of the French colonial
army, bound to the Marquesas to be their governor.

The captain was telling the story of the wreck in
which he had lost his former ship. He had tied
up to a reef for a game of cards with a like-minded
skipper, who berthed beside him. The wind changed
while they slept. Captain Pincher awoke to find
his schooner breaking her backs on the coral rocks.

“Oo can say wot the blooming wind will do?”
he said, thumping the table with his glass. “There
was Willy’s schooner tied up next to me, and
’e got a slant and slid away, while my boat busts
’er sides open on the reef, The ’ole blooming
atoll was ’eaped with the blooming cargo.
Willy ’ad luck; I ’ad ’ell.
It’s all an ’azard.”

He had not found his aitches since he left Liverpool,
thirty years earlier, nor dropped his silly expletives.
A gray-haired, red-faced, laughing man, stockily built,
mild mannered, he proved, as the afternoon wore on,
to be a man from whom Muenchausen might have gained
a story or two.

“He’s straight as a mango tree, Bill Pincher
is,” McHenry asserted loudly. “He’s
a terrible liar about stories, but he’s the best
seaman that comes to T’yti, and square as a biscuit
tin. You know how, when that schooner was stole
that he was mate on, and the rotten thief run away
with her and a woman, Bill he went after ’em,
and brought the schooner back from Chile. Bill,
he’s whatever he says he is, all right—­but
he can sail a schooner, buy copra and shell cheap,
sell goods to the bloody natives, and bring back the
money to the owners. That’s what I call
an honest man.”

Lying Bill received these hearty words with something
less than his usual good-humor. There was no
friendliness in his eye as he looked at McHenry, whose
empty glass remained empty until he himself refilled
it. Bullet-headed, beady-eyed, a chunk of rank
flesh shaped by a hundred sordid adventures, McHenry
clutched at equality with these men, and it eluded
him. Lying Bill, making no reply to his enthusiastic
commendation, retired to his bunk with a paper-covered
novel, and to cover the rebuff McHenry turned to talk
of trade with Gedge, who spoke little.